The Big Society

David Cameron's Big Society policy is rapidly becoming a joke as the media poke fun at the poorly explained, poorly understood concept.

The Conservatives have long standing objectives to reduce the size of the state; they believe that tax should be lower and individuals be given the freedom to decide how to spend their money. So it seems quite likely that the Big Society concept is camoflage designed to give this old objective a new gloss.

However, I feel that the quality of our democratic processes are being degraded as we centralise. The systems were put in place at a time when the population of the UK was much lower and so the concept of a local person representing a constituency in Parliament made some sense. There was no mass media so you would elect someone that you knew and trusted personally - hopefully someone that would act both public sipritedly and in the interest of their constituency. Today we get to know our MP through the filter of the media, they typically come from outside and they represent large numbers of people that they could never hope to meet.

I would like to see much more power devolved to a local level; borough councils, district councils and even parish councils. Maybe every group of 50 houses should elect someone to represent them.

So, the Big Society might bring some local influence and power to the people. However the grave danger is that because we've learned to be very selfish and materialistic in the last 30 years there will be very few people choosing to reinvest their tax savings into the local community, services will close and we will be poorer for it. On the other hand you can look to the work done by Transition groups across the world for an example of how people can make collective decisions and work together to improve their community. Sometimes these projects need grant assistance from government while others are run on a semi-commercial basis and are self sustaining.

But the idea of running major enterprises on  purely voluntary basis is clearly a non-starter as today's news demonstrates; Big society tsar Lord Wei 'doesn't have enough time to perform role'